Google’s Android was a major topic at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and one of the companies taking advantage of the OS is Myriad. The Zurich-based mobile technology firm has released the Dalvik Turbo virtual machine, which can boost application execution speed by up to three times, according to exes.
Dalvik is the virtual machine that powers the Java platform on Android-based phones. Myriad’s Dalvik Turbo basically replaces the existing Dalvik engine with a more powerful version, which speeds up apps, preserves battery life, and allows for more powerful apps – like games.
I stopped by Myriad’s booth at mobile, where Gael Rosset, vice president of product management at Myriad, showed off a demo of the technology.
Rosset launched a spinning, 3D cube animation on two identical, Android-based HTC phones – one running Dalvik Turbo and the other the standard Dalvik engine. The cube on the Dalvik Turbo was spinning much faster than the cube on the other phone, as demonstrated on the video above.

Rosset also launched a side-by-side Quicksort benchmark of the two phones. The benchmark on the Dalvik Turbo smartphone finished about one minute before the benchmark on the standard Dalvik phone (video below). Much to the pleasure of the Myriad execs, the “low battery” icon also popped up on the standard Dalvik smartphone during our benchmark demo, prompting Rosset to joke that their claims about battery life were indeed true.
How does it work? Rosset likened it to translation. To translate an English sentence to Spanish, a translator converts the entire phrase. With Dalvik Turbo, however, “we only translate what we think we need” to run the app, meaning there’s no CPU or RAM overhead, Rosset said. It’s a “straight swap” when replacing Dalvik standard with Dalvik Turbo, meaning no new software is required, he said.
Myriad is shopping the technology around to handset manufacturers and OEMs, so it’s not something you can install on your phone yourself. But Rosset said he had received good feedback from vendors at mobile, and that Dalvik Turbo was currently in the testing labs of several manufacturers, and should be showing up in phones in the next year.
It currently runs on Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1, Myriad said.